This website uses affiliate links, which may earn a commission for purchases made at no additional cost to you.
Challenges Complete:
- A-Z Challenge (U in Ursula)
- Spell Your Full Name (L in Le Guin)
Funny story.
I thought that this book was going to qualify for the challenge prompt to read a Top 10 Bestseller from my birth year.
Well… that proved a stark reminder that Google’s search results aren’t nearly as reliable as they once were. When I finished the book and started Le Guin’s afterword, a little lightning bolt went off in my brain when she mentioned that it never appeared on any bestseller list.
Wait a minute.
So, it turns out that Google was super wrong, and also that there were NOT many bestsellers the year I was born. I finally found the Publisher’s Weekly list for the year and will be using a different book from that list for this prompt later.
But I still read and loved A Wizard of Earthsea anyway!
The fantasy story is ostensibly for young adults, but I found it to be much more mature. Our protagonist, a mage named Ged (or Duny, or Sparrowhawk) has great power, but also deep pride. He goes to a wizarding school (this was a LONG time before Hogwarts) and develops his skills, but also falls into an impulsive and bitter rivalry with another student. Ged ultimately casts a spell that will lead him across a long path to rediscover himself.
In the sense that this is a bildungsroman, I can understand why A Wizard of Earthsea is marketed toward teens and young adults, but Le Guin’s deep understanding of the human condition and the beauty with which she writes helped it to feel particularly resonant as a person born the year this was published.
I am a huge fan of Hayao Miyazaki’s animated films, and I could see much of his inspiration in these pages. Indeed, Studio Ghibli, which he founded, produced a film called Tales from Earthsea. However, this film was written and directed by Miyazaki’s son Goro, and combined elements across the entire Earthsea series.
Le Guin was a true wordsmith, and I found myself so impacted by a number of different passages:
But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.
Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?
Think of this: that every word, every act of our Art is said and is done either for good, or for evil. Before you speak or do you must know the price that is to pay!”
Magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing.
And the truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do…”
I see shades of Le Guin’s ideas in Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and The Boy and the Heron. I see it in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks. The scarred boy wizard at school clearly begat Harry Potter (and Le Guin was much more open to the idea of gender fluidity, as you’ll discover if you read her masterful Left Hand of Darkness).
A Wizard of Earthsea is a treasure for fantasy fans and literary readers alike. This is how fantasy novels should feel.
Leave a Reply